Poor Elijah’s Almanack: The best-laid plans

By Peter Berger

Published
11:11 am EST, Monday, January 25, 2016

It was the spring of our senior year when we cut school to play basketball. Unfortunately, our neighborhood basketball court belonged to our old neighborhood elementary school. Despite some fairly impressive SAT scores, it didn’t occur to any of us that playing hooky on school grounds amounted to a less than brilliant move.

The following morning we all received invitations to confer with Mr. Berrian, our high school vice principal, a soft-spoken fellow famous for dining on varsity football players.

Discipline seemed simpler then. None of us brought along the family attorney. Nobody claimed the school was Constitutionally obliged to forewarn us in triplicate that cutting school was against the rules. We were supposed to know that.

Don’t misunderstand. Mr. Berrian’s methods weren’t always successful. Some people have always been persistently rude, troubled, antisocial, thoughtless, and malicious, not to mention those of us who are simply periodic jerks.

Mr. Berrian believed in trying to help kids straighten out, but he had two really strange ideas about discipline. First, even though he was the school “disciplinarian,” he didn’t think law enforcement, or behavior therapy, was the point of school. Second, he didn’t let behavior problems disrupt the education of other students. The rights of a disruptive student ended where the education of other students began.

Mr. Berrian is out of style now. A school near Poor Elijah recently declined to hire an assistant principal. This person would’ve spent his day dealing with discipline problems. Instead they hired a planning room teacher. This person spends his day dealing with discipline problems.

The difference is he does this in the planning room. In theory, planning rooms are “innovations” where “kids who have gotten into trouble” devise “strategies” to “avoid problems in the future.”

Often students fill out questionnaires. What did I do? Why did I do it? What was the result? What will I do differently next time?

For me in Mr. Berrian’s office, this would’ve been easy. I cut school. Why? Because I felt like taking the day off, and I thought I could get away with it. The result? I didn’t get away with it. What about next time? Next time I won’t cut school, at least not that visibly.

Actually, I never cut school again. This was partly because of two adults called parents that I kept at home. Also Mr. Berrian supplied a strategy for me. He called it “smarten up.”

This strategy doesn’t work for everybody. That day on Mr. Berrian’s bench I sat next to a famous school felon. Anybody who thinks an introspective, “problem solving” questionnaire would’ve pricked his conscience wasn’t sitting next to him.

The fact is, most regular students who misbehave don’t get sent to the planning room. They don’t need four-step questionnaires. All they need is a look or a threatening tone from their teacher. Planning rooms were invented for the students who chronically misbehave and disrupt classrooms. The trouble is these individuals typically don’t care about questionnaires. They’re either so disturbed that they can’t mend their ways, or they’re jerks, and they don’t want to.

Sorry. If we genuinely want to talk about the real world of kids, we need to be honest and recognize that some are just as nasty, deceitful, and dangerous as their adult counterparts.

Some students do carry staggering burdens to school, and sometimes they need a private kind word or a caring adult – teacher, counselor, or principal – who will listen and advise them.

Planning rooms, however, tend to serve as holding tanks where chronically disruptive students catch their behavioral breath so they can come back refreshed to class just as it’s settling down in the wake of their last performance and disrupt it again.

Maybe these students need help. Maybe they need “a year in the pen” with Officer Krupke. One thing is clear. The rest of the children in the class don’t need to have their education trampled on and stolen from them. This happens day in and day out in schools across the nation, and it is a shame and an injustice and a disgrace.

Advocates press for the rights of the disrupters, the “behaviorally challenged.” Who will speak for the twenty other children in the class?

Planning rooms are big on “problem solving” and decision-making. Students who are sent to the planning room “know it’s up to them to make choices…If they make a bad choice, there will be consequences.”

That’s right. If I’m a student, and you choose to whack me over the head, or disrupt and steal my math class, you may suffer some consequences. But so will I, and why should I? Who’s paying the price for you to make your serial bad choices and relearn your lesson?

Boosters describe the planning room as a place where “discipline…gives way to problem-solving,” as if discipline were bad, and the new order an improvement over the old.

Discipline comes from the Latin word for student. Discipline means teaching and training yourself, or being taught and trained, rigorously and deliberately, not because it feels good, but because it is good.

When it comes to conduct and academics, this is a lesson we and our schools need to learn.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.